Marvell ’ s Allusions

This article attempts to define Marvell’s allusions and offers six characteristic features of his allusivity to do so: indirectness, similitude, denaturalization/adaptation, ironic contrast, criticism, and meaningfulness. Based on these features, the article maintains that the allusion is a particularly intellective, intricate, and intentional category of Marvellian intertextuality. It compares these qualities with the Marvellian echo, whose dubious intentionality, greater visibility, and shallower meaning markedly contrast with the allusion. While the moment of readerly recognition frequently exhausts the meaning of an echo, allusions contain depths that readers must laboriously sound. In short, the article attempts to introduce more precision and accuracy into a body of scholarship that frequently treats Marvell’s echoes and allusions as interchangeable.

The first involves the practical matter of dating poems, and the second entails the different kinds of textual engagement these intertextual categories signal. Total permeability between echoes and allusions makes the practice of intertextually dating poems impossible: where does the unconscious echo end and the deliberate allusion begin? 8 Of course, those who wish to throw over the notion of authorial intent as an organizing principle of allusion will not be bothered by this permeability. Marvell scholarship (in general) has not taken this approach, and its wisdom will be apparent below during a consideration of allusion and intention.
The second motivation for distinguishing between allusion and echo has to do with how each works. With allusions, the dynamic between revelation and concealment can have a directly proportional relationship (obscurity, high; meaningfulness, high) or an inversely proportional relationship (obscurity, low; meaningfulness, high). 9 The obscurity of the allusion conceals the intensely meaningful engagement between the allusion and the text to which it alludes. Or the deceptively straightforward verbal parallels upon which the allusion forms cannot express the depth and complexity of the textual encounter: an easygoing veneer of similitude does not adequately represent the labors (for author, reader) of forging connections and the significance of the connections once forged. With echoes, the dynamic between revelation and concealment is directly proportional (obscurity, low; meaningfulness, low): the echoes are more obvious, but their engagement with the source of the echo is less meaningful, less full of the richness of "allusive implication." 10 The meaning of an echo is often exhausted at the moment of its recognition; allusions require more work, and they repay it. Or, to put that another way, the echo requires work that it does not repay with a challenging, significant, and variously complex relation between texts. For example, Loxley describes the echo as "involuntary" and as constituting "blank, alienated repetitions." 11 In a later essay, he expands on this definition.
The "causal forces" of echo "are best described as grammatical or linguistic; others arise from the demands of poetic language and form in particular, and from the not at all coincidental molding force, operative in all aspects of the writing process, of genre." 12 Such confluences are never "inert or non-negotiable," 13 but they can be, in Loxley's memorable descriptor, involuntary. Echoes can consist of a verbal reflex to particular formal and narrative stimuli. In this scenario, they have all the consciousness and intentionality of an instinctual response. This is not an attempt to denigrate the echo by presenting it as automatic and uninteresting. And yet, while I believe the conscious echo exists, I cannot demonstrate its existence through the methods employed here. That is, the consciousness of the echo does not exist in the formal workings of echoes but independently from the text, in Loxley's "social matrices," and from historical data concerning reading habits, coteries, etc. Moreover, echoes can be more interesting than mere repetition, and they can also introduce difference between the echoing text and the source of the echo; the manipulation of such difference, as we will see, constitutes one of the defining features of allusion. Whereas allusions alter the language of the source as a means of instituting difference, echoes rely on context for difference, since a too great alteration in language would defeat the low obscurity of the echo. For instance, in one of the examples that follows, a verbal echo obtains between a polemical context and one that praises the heavenly rewards of virginity. The two contexts are different, and they may even be discontinuous, but I do not doubt some irony could be derived from their difference (with no small measure of ingenuity). In this way, echoes possess some capacity for registering distinctions between echoing text and source, but the capability arises from contextual-as opposed to verbal-difference. 11 Loxley, "The Social Modes," 21. 12 Loxley, "Echoes as Evidence," 169.  Short Historical Essay, Touching General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Matters of Religion (1676) conform to the previous description of echoing. In these echoes, the dynamic between revelation and concealment is directly proportional.
The echoes do not contain a depth of meaning and that can be measured by the number of times a reference (echo or allusion) requires a reader to move back and forth between texts. After initial recognition of the echo, the movement will not be very frequent or it will be unfruitful: echoes are, by definition, unresolved, merely petering out without any answer; they are their own answer. The questions they raise about the source text, the attitudes they suggest, the connections they intimate are left unanswered, undeveloped, or unfastened. In the examples below, stylistic and narrative differences subtend every verbal parallel. And yet no overarching purpose (such as irony) assimilates and makes sense of the differences. Finally, the echoes employ language and imagery that recall Ezekiel 34 and John 10, two texts to which Lycidas is also indebted. It becomes quite difficult to claim allusion by disentangling these sources from each other and clearly identifying where a borrowing from one source occurs.
That Marvell should echo Lycidas, a poem to which he frequently alludes, comes as no surprise. Marvell was intimately familiar with Milton's elegy, as Nicholas von Maltzahn has shown. 14 Indeed, it may be this familiarity that produces the echoes; he knows the poem so well, has internalized it to such a degree, that Lycidas appears in places Marvell does not intend. 15 The two examples below aim to demonstrate the profitability of reading echoes in relation to other echoes. While Loxley rightly concludes that many echoes do not an allusion make, that should not discourage 14 Nicholas von Maltzahn, "Death by Drowning: Marvell's Lycidas," Milton Studies 48 (2008): 38-52. 15 Marvell memorized whole prose works by Milton, so it may be possible he memorized the poem. The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 16 Loxley, "Echoes as Evidence," 168. The resemblance that first connected Marvell's prose and Milton's poem in my mind was the use of "creep" (Milton, "creep"; Marvell, "crept"). Marvell takes the verb a little less seriously than Milton, and he emphasizes the desperation of the creepers to enter the church at all costs, even if it is through the belfry (a difficult climb) or at the windows (possibly breaking them). Marvell's creepers make an entrance where there is not one, and they are somewhat ridiculous in doing so. Milton's creepers insinuate themselves into the fold with stealth (they are guilty of trespassing, Marvell's of breaking and entering). The comic desperation of Marvell's clerics differs from the covert operations of Milton's.
Further differences between texts appear in the pun Marvell makes while excoriating episcopal inability to remove incompetent priests: "But since that circumspection has been devolved into the single oversight of the later Bishops, it cannot be otherwise, but some one or other may <sometimes> escape into the Church, who were much fitter to be shut out of Doors." 20 In "oversight" and "circumspection," Marvell puns on the Greek word for bishop, "ἐπίσκοπος" ("overseer"). This is similar to Milton's famous pun in "Blind mouthes." In contrast with Milton, Marvell does not pun on the Latin "pastor." Since a pun on "ἐπίσκοπος" was hardly uncommon, Marvell need not have Milton in mind. 21 The puns also differ stylistically. Milton accuses the clerics of blindness outright; Marvell mocks their pretensions to sight.
Where Marvell is lithe, subtle, and ironic, Milton is brash, strident, apocalyptic: Marvell's scalpel does different work than Milton's sledgehammer. 19 Quotations of Lycidas are from John Milton, John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella Revard (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Line numbers will appear in parentheses. 20 Marvell,The Prose Works, Marvell also applies the verbal parallels differently. As the reader compares the wind that swells Milton's sheep with the "blown Deer" of Marvell's herd, he constructs a rather tenuous parallel between swelling in one poem and blowing in the other. While the bad shepherds in Lycidas are ignorant of the "Herdmans art," Marvell's prelates practice evil arts. The "rottenness" that Marvell's shepherds exhibit In these sentences, Marvell conflates Ezekiel 34, John 10, and the St. Peter verse paragraph. He takes the detail of "scattering their Flocks" from Ezekiel 34:5 passim and John 10:12: "But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep" (KJV). No comparable scattering occurs in Lycidas. Pastors who turn into devourers receive the famous appellation "Blind mouthes!" in Lycidas, but Ezekiel 34:10 observes a similar irony: "for I will deliver my flock from their [shepherds'] mouth, that they may not be meat for them." Lycidas cannot represent a unique source for Marvell's scattered flocks and devouring pastors. "Shepherds smiting one another," though, presents a different case: Besides what the grim Woolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing sed, But that two-handed engine at the door, Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. (128-31) The famously enigmatic "two-handed engine" that smites is not the same as "Shepherds smiting one another." But neither Ezekiel 34 nor John 10 contains comparable language. The divergence in subject of "smite" and "smiting" suggests that Marvell is not thinking very clearly about Lycidas, but that the poem may nevertheless informin even a subconscious way-his depiction of bad shepherds. This type of echo has such a tenuous relation to intentionality that it requires the negotiation of an individual's unconscious. The echo may very well be the product of accident, but accident does not make Lycidas disappear. From this premise, one can extrapolate to Stephen Hinds's position that no echo is ever "inert or non-negotiable." 25 Accident is just another form of intertextuality and not its terminus ad quem.
For example, at the conclusion of the paragraph that contains the echoes of Lycidas, Marvell includes part of a letter Gregory Nazianzen wrote on the character of bishops: "For their obstinate Contentions and Ambition are unexpressible" ("nec ullis quidem verbis explicari queunt"). 26 Marvell's "unexpressible" certainly captures Nazianzen's Latin. It does compress it slightly, leaving "ullis verbis" implicit. Perhaps Marvell found "nec explicari queunt" in no need of addition. Or perhaps there is another reason that leads us back-along the inroads of Marvell's mind-to Lycidas. At the conclusion of Milton's elegy, Edward King hears the "unexpressive nuptiall Song" (176). If a rationale exists for associating Edward King's listening to Revelation 14:4 with Nazianzen's unflattering comments about bishops, it is beyond me. No principle guides the conjoining of the two texts. Pressing the echo for a meaning greater than its mere occurrence wrings blood from a stone. The incidence of "unexpressible" seems random or the product of associational thinking of which Marvell may not be aware. Later in A Short Historical Essay, Marvell imagines what a world without episcopacy would be like: "but the good that must have thence risen to the Christian Magistrate, and the Church, then and ever after, would have been inexpressible." 27 "Inexpressible" and "unexpressible" are synonyms, and yet "unexpressible" becomes "inexpressible" when it no longer occurs in close proximity to echoes of Lycidas. 28 A sense of contingency and perhaps even randomness characterizes this echo; it 25 Hinds, Allusion and Intertext, 47. 26 Marvell, The Prose Works, 2.159. 27 Marvell, The Prose Works, 2.170. 28 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. "unexpressible" (adj. and n.), accessed 30 June 2020, www-oedcom.proxy.lib.siu.edu.
McGrath: Marvell's Allusions 11 seems the opposite of allusive premeditation. Allusions require readers to put them together in a certain way, but they often encode that structure (and a map for readers) in the alterations they perform on the source text; each alteration is an argument about how to interpret and assemble the allusion. Echoes, in the minimal ways they engage with the source text, do not have this capacity. The echo here seems especially fragile and dependent on being put together in just the right way (hence, what I am calling its contingency).
Finally, in a poet known for compression, it is significant that the echoes in both The Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part and A Short Historical Essay are spread out within the individual paragraphs in which they occur. 29 In The Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part, five sentences intervene between "crept" and the rest of the echo; in A Short Historical Essay, five sentences again separate "smiting" and "unexpress- namely, that their relation to the source text is at best superficial and at worst incoherent (the "unexpressive Nuptiall song" and Nazianzen's "unexpressible"); that the differences they introduce between the source text and the alluding text exhibit no clear rationale; that the echoes' incoherence may reflect formally in their scattered organization; and that the reason behind the occurrence of an echo may be one of contingency (i.e., with no apparent forethought). Moreover, I have also sought to show the utility of interpreting echoes in relation to other echoes as a way of confirming their status as such.
In comparison with the messiness of anatomizing Marvell's echoes, defining his allusions represents a more straightforward endeavor, both for the relative integrity

McGrath: Marvell's Allusions 14
text to the alluding text, but not to the point of unrecognizability; 39 ironic contrast between the alluding text and the object of allusion; 40 criticism of the source text, where "critical" can denote censoriousness but also explication and interpretation; 41 and meaningfulness, so that the mere recognition of the allusion never exhausts its meaning. 42 Though I have presented these attributes in a certain order, that does not mean they ever proceed in such a prescriptive way. Marvell might begin with similitude and happen upon ironic contrast; or he might start with criticism and denature the source text to obscure his allusion. The chronology of the attributes matters less than recognizing how they interact with each other: that is, how some attributes activate others (e.g., criticism and ironic contrast), how some exist in constant tension with others (e.g., indirectness and similitude), and how Marvell negotiates that tension or sees in it a possibility. would not share a drink with a man in whose hands he would not trust his life"? 45 The tendency towards intertextual circumscription, in paired poems such as "Hortus" and "The Garden," must reflect a fantasy of allusive control. 46 One's own poem reacts more predictably and more manageably with one's own poems; other poems carry with them associations, contexts, and reception history that could endanger the integrity of the allusion. Self-allusion dramatically illustrates Marvell's solicitude about authorial control and the extent to which his allusions go in safeguarding it.
As a result, theories of intertextuality that deny authorial intention entirely, posit that it is the reader who constructs allusions, argue that texts allude and authors only find allusions already present therein, 47 or, finally, treat allusion as a merely useful heuristic 48 have a limited applicability to Marvell's work.
For example, in The Rhetoric of Imitation, Gian Biagio Conte offers these reflections on intentionality: If one concentrates on the text rather than on the author, on the relation between texts (intertextuality) rather than on imitation, then one will be less likely to fall into the common philological trap of seeing all textual resemblances as produced by the intentionality of a literary subject whose only desire is to emulate. The philologist who seeks at all costs to read intention into imitation will inevitably fall into a psychological reconstruction of motive, whether it is homage, admiring compliment, parody, or the attempt to improve upon the original. 49 Why does a concentration on authorial intent reduce the author to only an imitator, one who wishes to pay homage to, compliment, parody, or better an original? 45 Raymond,"'Small Portals,'" 34. 46

McGrath: Marvell's Allusions 16
Marvell does all of these and more. But his allusions also frequently engage the original with a critical skepticism that subordinates the sentimentality Conte associates with mere aemulatio. Marvell can objectify and therefore obviate what lies on the other side of the critic's "psychological reconstruction of motive." 50 Other theories of intertextuality cede an illimitable power to the reader. For example, Lowell Edmunds endeavors to make the reader "the locus of intertextuality." 51 The "reader" represents a problematic category for Marvell. If the circulation of verse during his lifetime offers any guide for Marvell's preoccupation with readers, then they preoccupied him very little, and he composed the majority of his verse with one reader in mind. 52 An expectation of readerly interpretation must minimally influence the composition of Marvell's allusions, at least in so far as many of the poems are concerned. The distance between an author's intention and a reader's ability to perceive that intention-a space intertextuality makes theoretically viable and whose possibilities it negotiates with readers authoring allusions-has been foreclosed by Marvell's author-reader. This is partly what accounts for the extent to which Marvell's allusions manifest authorial control.
Nonetheless, I do not wish to banish intertextuality from Marvell scholarship. In fact, Edmunds's theory of intertextuality illuminates something about the temporal dynamics of Marvell's allusions. Edmunds observes that "scholarship on Roman poetry … keeps intertextuality in a one-way relation of later T 1 to earlier T 2 (T 1 quotes T 2 ). But this relation is reversible." 53 Marvell does not so much reverse the relationship between T 1 and T 2 as he discovers allusions in the earlier text of which the author was not cognizant. In "Upon Appleton House" (1651), the speaker retreats into the Nun Appleton woods where "The oak leaves me embroider all …/And ivy, with familiar trails,/Me licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales./Under this antic cope I move/Like some great prelate of the grove" (74.587-92). The phrase "antic cope" 50 Cf. Colie's praise for Marvell's admirable detachment. Colie, "My Ecchoing Song," 4. May I as worthlesse seeme to Thee As all, but Thou,appeares to Mee. 58 In "All this fair, and soft, and sweet," Marvell alludes to Cowley's "soft, or sweet, or faire." This verbal similitude forms the basis for the allusion. And yet similitude does not become sameness, for Marvell introduces two changes that incorporate indirectness into the allusion: Marvell's poem switches the order of Cowley's adjectives and links them with "and" instead of "or." Allusion as criticism ("or" to "and") and allusion as denaturalization/adaptation (the sequence of adjectives) also govern these alterations. "And" does not jar with "all" the way "or" does in "The Soule"; "and" is additive-inexhaustibly so-instead of introducing discrete alternatives. Marvell improves upon the conjunctive logic of his original. But the change hardly seems competitive 57 See Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 6. or petty. Indeed, the alteration offers something to its source text: clarification. This is Marvell's poetry of criticism transposed into an allusive key, and by "critical" we should understand astutely improving upon and not enviously outdoing. 59 The poet in Marvell cannot help but improve a poem, and allusion is one way of effecting that betterment.
Marvell's re-sequencing of Cowley's adjectives adapts "The Soule" to the particular poetic context of "A Dialogue." In Marvell's poem, Pleasure's first temptation seeks to entice Soul through the sense of taste and the second temptation through touch.
In fact, the second temptation even uses the word "soft": "On these downy pillows lie,/Whose soft plumes will thither fly" (19)(20). While the fourth temptation focuses on sight, it urges a self-directed visual allure: "But since none deserves that grace,/In this crystal view thy face" (33-34). The "fair" in "All this fair, and soft, and sweet" does not as flagrantly duplicate enticements through which Pleasure has already tried to induce Soul. Self-fairness has been tried, but not the fairness of an external object.
"Soft" would obviously recall the temptation of touch; "sweet" might clearly reiterate the temptation to taste, even though the sweetness mentioned in line fifty-one means something like pleasing. 60 But "fair," since Pleasure acknowledges the inability of external visual stimuli to attract Soul, does not as readily repeat. While "fair" avoids mere repetition, that is not to say some repetitiveness is not a welcome feature of lines fifty-one to fifty-four. The temptation of amorous delight consolidates previous temptations, and hence the use of words such as "fair," "soft," and "sweet" that recall those temptations. It makes sense that this heightened tempting follows the Chorus's admonition regarding "new charges" (49).
We have now seen two alterations that Marvell makes to "The Soule" ("or" to "and" and the sequence of adjectives), and what qualities of the Marvellian allusion they signify. The next allusive attributes do not result from alterations Marvell performs but from his decision to bring "A Dialogue" into close allusive relation with "The if (for I a curse will give,/Such as shall force thee to beleive)/My Soule bee not entirely Thine,/May thy deare Body ner'e bee Mine." 61 At this logic, Marvell's Soul would no doubt be horrified. Not only does the speaker in "The Soule" barter between the material and spiritual realms, but he regards an exchange between them as an even trade. This is precisely the concession to materiality that Soul in "A Dialogue" everywhere resists. A deep irony informs Marvell's allusions to Cowley's "The Soule." How could it not, for that poem rates the soul at far too low a value.
Considering the basic philosophical differences in outlook between these two poems, it should not come as a surprise that the speaker of "The Soule" embraces the fair, soft, and sweet beauty that Soul in "A Dialogue" finds repulsive. Moreover, a subtle divergence in how each poem measures that which is soft, sweet, and fair in relation to the beloved ("The Soule") and "one beauty" ("A Dialogue") further substantiates just how far apart the outlooks of these poems remain. Pleasure avers that everything fair, soft, and sweet will be collected into one beauty. The speaker in "The Soule," by contrast, contends that no fairness, softness, or sweetness exist independently of the beloved: "If all things that in Nature are/Either soft, or sweet, or faire,/Bee not in Thee so'Epitomiz'd,/That naught material's not compriz'd." The beloved is the epitome of all things soft, sweet, and fair. In a surprising twist, this leads the speaker to declare "That naught material's not compriz'd": namely, that not any material (soft, sweet, or fair) is not so comprised (i.e., derived from the softness, sweetness, and fairness of the beloved). Later in the poem, the speaker argues "that all faire Species bee/Hyeroglyphick markes of Thee." 62 No fairness exists but that of the beloved; subsequent examples represent antitypes of an original type.
Cowley's typology of fair, soft, and sweet compliments the beloved extravagantly. It goes beyond the combination of these qualities into "one beauty" in "A Dialogue." We might expect Pleasure to adopt this viewpoint. And yet, it is one so besotted that its prospects of gaining a foothold with Soul are simply implausible. Marvell, by opting for a less extreme commitment to things soft, sweet, and fair than contained in denaturalization/adaptation, and allusive criticism apply to how Marvell switches the order of Cowley's adjectives and links them with "and" instead of "or." Ironic contrast informs the derivation and treatment of things soft, fair, and sweet in the two poems. The allusion as criticism appears in how "A Dialogue" urges us to notice things about "The Soule": namely, its extreme material investments. This is one of the most interesting features of Marvell's allusions, and we saw the reductio ad absurdum of this quality in "no marvell." His allusions respond to the source text in such a way that they illuminate something about it. A creative generosity informs this approach to allusivity. His allusions are critical. Marvell does not simply take from the source text in the course of alluding: he also gives something back. The echo takes (what could it give but adulation or irony?). The allusion both takes and gives.
Finally, meaningfulness manifests in how every alteration of "The Soule" or difference with it opens onto a broader plane of interpretive possibility. Similitude becomes indirectness ("or" to "and") and then allusive criticism (bettering Cowley's poem). Indirectness (resequencing of the adjectives) turns into adaptation. The adaptation shows how Marvell prepares Cowley's line for inclusion in "A Dialogue," and it also reveals the intense scrutiny to which he subjects his own poem (i.e., orchestrating Pleasure's temptations to avoid repetition). And the differences between the poems-what the speakers embrace and how they measure things fair and soft and sweet-serve as the basis for ironic contrast and allusive criticism. As Marvell's allusion shuttles between allusive attributes (one activating another), as it causes the reader to identify the differences between texts, the allusion possesses a kind of coruscating energy. Its ramifications ramify; one allusive attribute erupts into the next. This is no inert echo. The energy of Marvell's allusions should give scholarship one more reason to pause when equating the highly controlled, meticulously deployed, and intricately designed Marvellian allusion with the less-developed echo.

Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.